Arvind Narayanan's journal

— India was great. Hot, humid, and full of dust, but still great. Where else can you buy any book you want for the equivalent of 3 dollars? And of course, Carnatic music. And you won't suffer brain damage if you watch commercials, unlike the US. But I'm back now, and I've never been more eager to get back to work.

— A couple of "there has to be a word for this" scenarios:

*When you're waiting at the baggage claim for like a half hour (I checked - it really takes that long for a large airplane), watching the bags come on to the belt one by one, with increasing dread every passing minute that your bags aren't going to be there. (Like I've said elsewhere, I consider the baggage routing system fundamentally broken.)

*When you take a dump at the airport (or anywhere with an automatic flush), get up, and are terrified for a couple seconds that the end-of-dump-detection algorithm isn't going to work.

— I've never understood why people are always in a hurry to board their flight an hour before departure. You get to the airport early because you're paranoid, fine. You're worried that the cosmos will conspire to delay you on your way to the airport and make you miss your flight and it will be the end of the world, so you get there three hours early. But why are people so eager to take their seats, packed like sardines, bored out of their minds? Outside, you can at least stroll around, do some window shopping, whatever. The flight isn't going to leave before the scheduled time, morons.

— In America, people walk briskly on moving walkways. In Europe, people are content to stand on them.

— 0.25 Euro a minute for internet access is daylight robbery!!

— Sometimes I think intelligence evolved in humans primarily to help us keep out of the way of shitting pigeons.

— Proof was great. Gwyneth Paltrow played a difficult part to perfection. The plot was good, but the screenplay not so hot. The constant gardener was not bad. I don't sympathize much with the theme (corporate corruption conspiracy theories) but the direction and acting were good.